Permanent Marks
by Midwinter Monday
Summary: Jace and Clary in New York, a few weeks after City of Glass. Clary is still struggling to come to terms with all that has happened. Jace, she thinks, hasn't even begun — and maybe some things you don't ever really recover from. A chance conversation brings it all crashing down on their heads, plumbing the depths of love's power to hurt — and to heal. (**CHAPTERS NEWLY REDIVIDED**)
1. Opening

**_H__ELP! WHAT HAPPENED TO THE OTHER CHAPTERS? __(O__ct 2014)_**

_Don't worry: nothing has been deleted! I've just combined chapters to make fewer, longer chapters — which is how the story was actually written. The nine short chapters I initially posted it in were the upshot of technical issues; this restores the story to its original form. I hope it's an improvement. __Sorry for any confusion!_  


_In summary: Ch 1 is unchanged. Old Chs 2&3 are now combined into Ch2. Chs 4&5 are now Ch3. Chs 6&7 are now Ch4. Chs 8&9 are now Ch5. _**_  
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**A/N:** This fic started out as a little framing scene for one of my Jace and Valentine one-shots, before taking on a sprawling life of its own. The ending of _City of Glass _leaves both Jace and Clary with unfinished emotional business. The minute I got them talking about the events in my one-shot, I realised they couldn't have the conversation I'd imagined for them without all the rest coming crashing down on their heads. The upshot was this fic.

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A Note about Canon:  
My fan fiction takes the original _City of Bones_ trilogy as canon. Try to read this story as if you hadn't read the later three books, ignoring the ways it may contradict (or conceivably, echo) things that Clare has established since _City of Glass_ — because that's how it was written. For more about why I haven't read the second trilogy or other extras, see my profile.

Disclaimer:  
Everything in this fic belongs to the incomparable Cassandra Clare: characters, story and universe, of course, but also — to the best of my ability — tone and language and imagery: I've borrowed phrases and devices shamelessly, trying to get closer to the feel of her story. Readers of _City of Ashes_ will recognize the dialogue quoted from there. Apologies also to Dorothy Dunnett, from whom I've stolen a couple of excellent lines, and to Dickens for some unforgettable imagery. The lyrics to Edith Piaf's incomparable chanson, _Non, je ne regrette rien_, were written by Michel Vaucaire.

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**_If you enjoy this fic, _****_please_****_ take a moment and tell me! I'll never know unless you do. Particularly if there's anything you especially liked — or found boring! Then I'll know what you'd like to read more of...  
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**Permanent Marks**  
by midwinter monday

|o|

"It's not that I'm nervous about it, exactly." Clary stared out at the East River, watching a tug doggedly push its barge against the churning current. There was a cold wind blowing off the river, but it had stopped pouring for the first time all week, and she'd been desperate to get outside. Even if it meant eating lunch on a freezing bench under skies like slate, with a stiff breeze whipping her hair into her mouth. She tucked her hands into her sleeves, trying not to get egg salad on the cuffs. Jace, as usual, didn't seem to feel the cold.

"Ok, so maybe I am, a little," she admitted. It felt easier to talk out here, away from the Institute. It was probably just the horrible weather, and the unending hours of lessons, but she was starting to feel the weight of stone all around her almost like a physical pressure.

Not that she was unhappy: the lessons were too interesting for that. And Jace was always there waiting to reclaim her, shoulders propped against the corridor wall and a glow in his eyes that made her breath catch, when she emerged exhilarated and exhausted from another long session with whichever Lightwood was supervising her studies that day. They were supposed to be getting a new tutor any day now, but the Clave seemed to be taking their time about sending a replacement. "Maybe they can't find anyone qualified to teach us," Jace had suggested hopefully. More likely, Isabelle observed, nobody wanted the job of keeping Jace in order.

Actually, thought Clary, casting a quick look at Jace, he'd been unnaturally well-behaved these past weeks. Too well-behaved, she thought with a flicker of worry. But then, they were all subdued: struggling to come to terms with the shock of everything that had happened, and their own family tragedy. Shadowhunters lived their lives in the shadow of violent death, but a child was different. Max's death had torn a hole in their family you could see daylight through; it would be a long time, she thought, before any of them really recovered from his murder.

Something splashed out in the river making Clary start so that the soda she was holding spilled over her fingers in a fizzing stream.

_Pull yourself together, Fray_. Clary set down the can impatiently, sucking the stickiness off her knuckles. Luke would have told her to take a deep breath and count to ten, his steady blue gaze fixed on hers until she stopped freaking out. With the rational part of her brain, she knew that it was only a seagull snatching something from the waves, or a trick of the tide sending an little wave curling more fiercely than the rest — same as it had always been. Just because she could see the Shadow World now didn't mean starting to look for it behind every lamp post.

Demonic activity was actually as low as anyone could remember, so Maryse said — as if the collapse of Valentine's demon army had sent some kind of a dampening reverberation through the infernal worlds. Did demons get discouraged? Somehow it didn't seem likely. Whatever the reason though, there hadn't been a single demon outbreak in several weeks.

Still, Clary couldn't shake the feeling of dark things moving beneath the surface of the filthy water. The predictable side-effect of a crash course in demonology, she told herself firmly, repressing with a shudder a vision of black, oily tentacles reaching up out of the deep — or maybe the weather really was getting to her. That, and her uneasy awareness of the Clave's ongoing post-mortem into what they were already calling the Valentine Affair — as if, thought Clary bitterly, it had been an unpleasant scandal, not a war — and of the official enquiry that was hanging over them all, Jocelyn, Jace, the Lightwoods and she supposed herself, like the sword of Damocles.

An image flashed unwanted into her mind of a winged sword suspended against a wall, darkly gleaming, and she shoved it away queasily. The last time she'd seen that sword, it was buried to the hilt in Jace's bloody chest.

Clary stole a glance at Jace. He had polished off his souvlaki with his usual efficiency, and was leaning back against the bench, slicing his empty Coke can meditatively to ribbons with an ivory-handled dagger. Luckily the Promenade was pretty much deserted. Clary had the feeling even the most blasé Upper East Sider might notice a boy with a twelve-inch blade.

She opened her mouth, and then thought better of it.

As if he'd heard her, Jace looked up and the corners of his mouth lifted. "I know — no glamour. I imagine you're going to point out that if a passing jogger looked this way, we'd have a SWAT team on us faster than you can say 'New York recycles'. Maryse would go ballistic."

He cast a speculative glance down the promenade, and for an instant a hopeful expression gleamed in his shadowed face, but it didn't reach his eyes. Clary wasn't sure anything did these days. It was as if Jace was holding himself very still, like someone carrying a brimming bowl: something so precariously full that you had to move with infinite care or it would slop over the sides and spill over everything.

Of course the events of last month had shattered his world in ways she couldn't begin to fully imagine. More, even, than they had turned her own life upside down. She'd lost everything she thought she knew: her comfortable, ordinary Park Slope childhood; the clean-cut, smiling father she'd never known; her artistic, abstracted, _normal _mom; the reassuring certainty that the world was what it seemed. Everything she'd believed for sixteen years, rewritten out of existence, wiped clean as completely as Valentine and his demons had stripped her home bare.

But in exchange, a birthright — frightening and entrancing — that she was only beginning to explore. And her mother was still there. Irrevocably changed — but at the same time so totally, disconcertingly the same that sometimes when Clary watched her standing at her easel, dubiously dabbing at a canvas in her old paint-streaked smock, it was hard to believe these last weeks hadn't just been a dream.

Clary gazed across the water at the decaying industrial waterfront on the far side of the river, remote and unreal as a painted backdrop, and thought about her mother's part in those wrenching losses. In its way, the accusation Valentine had levelled at her mother was true. The things Valentine had taken away from Clary had never really been hers; she had just been allowed to think they were. It was going to take a while to forgive all the lies.

But you didn't stop loving people just because they made mistakes, however colossal. And her mother's own love for her was real, and always had been, even through all those years of deception. Love wasn't something you could rewrite, however illusory all the rest might turn out to be. Luke was still Luke too: solid, kind, totally dependable, if a little wolfier than she'd realized. Luke, whose patient devotion to her mother had finally brought him the reward he deserved. The past weeks had woven him more securely than ever into the fabric of her life. She had a lot salvaged from the wreckage.

Whereas for Jace, it was just a vast, black maelstrom of loss.

Clary crumpled up her sandwich paper savagely and threw it into the trash can at the end of the bench. A gust of wind flung it back at her.

Jace plucked it expertly out of the air an inch from her face.

"Nice one." Leaning across, he shied the crumpled wrapper neatly into the garbage can with a careless accuracy that suddenly made Clary think of Jace's dagger flying end over end across the room at Renwick's — swift and sure and deadly.

"Personally," he added blandly, "I'd try aiming a bit higher in the wind, if you want to go for the rebound shot. Flattens the angle of return — and stops your weapon taking your nose off."

The mocking look faded from his face, as he took in her expression.

"It's nothing to be nervous about, Clary," he said, and his voice was unexpectedly gentle. With his free hand, he smoothed a wind-blown curl back from her face, and the brush of his fingertips was like an electric current tingling along her skin.

"Really it's not," he said firmly. "I promise."

With a sigh, Clary pulled her feet up onto the bench and wrapped her arms round her knees. "I know." She thought of telling Jace he'd misread her face and decided against it.

"I think it's mainly the not-knowing thing that's getting to me," she said, pressing her chin into the worn denim of her knees. Jace had stuck his dagger back in his belt and was fiddling with the shards of his soda can now, the way he did when he was unsettled, twisting the razor-sharp ribbons restlessly around his long fingers.

"Starting to become properly part of the Shadow World — it's like I'm suddenly a small child again: clueless about the most basic things, stuff everyone takes for granted." She hugged her knees tighter. "I guess I just hate not having the faintest idea what to expect."

Jace was silent for a moment.

"It's not a big deal." he said slowly. "Honestly. But you should probably talk to Isabelle or Alec. Or Luke." His voice was uninflected, but Clary could feel the sudden tension in his body. "My own experience was—" He hesitated, eyes on the tangled metal in his hands.

"Different," he finished eventually. "It's not anything you can go by." His fair head was bent, his face invisible beneath the gold, veiling curls. Clary could see a pulse beating at his throat. According to Isabelle, it wasn't something Jace talked about. He'd been too young, she said.

"Jace, what happened?" she asked gently, when it was clear he wasn't going to go on.

He was silent for so long she thought he wasn't going to answer. When at last he looked up, his face was a tangle of conflicting emotions. Reaching for his hand, Clary wound her small fingers around his strong, slender ones, the faded tracery of old Marks curling round them like scraps of lace. Even lying loose in her hand, she could feel their coiled strength.

Jace sighed, and his eyes lifted to hers, wide and dark and undefended. He looked suddenly terribly vulnerable, and Clary thought of the way he had gazed at her on the steps of the Accords Hall on the night of the victory celebrations — as if all the defensive walls he'd thrown up around himself for so long had tumbled flat.

But he had seemed lost then, adrift. There was a light of quiet resolve in his face now, resolve and a trust so absolute it took her breath away. Not defencelessness, thought Clary, but deliberate and willing acquiescence — the composure of someone who sees the knife, and tranquilly bares their breast to the blade. _You could do anything you wanted with me, and I would let you, _he'd told her once.

"You really want to know?"

Clary nodded slowly. Suddenly she wasn't sure she did. But if Jace could bring himself to tell her — whatever it was — she could hear it. The wind was still rising, blowing off the river with a violence more typical of winter than early October. Pulling up her hood with a grimace, she waited.

"Are you sitting comfortably?" He shot her a glance from underneath his lashes, and Clary was relieved to hear the familiar sardonic edge was back in his voice. "It's a long story." He sat in silence for a moment longer, playing absently with her fingers, before closing his hand deliberately around hers.

"I probably shouldn't tell it to you — you don't like Shadowhunter stories much, do you?" The ghost of a reminiscent smile passed across his face. "But I think I'd like you to hear it." The dull grey skies had dimmed the bright gold of his eyes to brass, but a steady light shone in their depths.

"It tells you something about the power of belief, I suppose: mind over matter or something like that." He smiled faintly.

"And about my — about your — father."

Disentangling his fingers gently from hers, he turned away towards the gun-metal river sliding relentlessly between its banks, and staring straight ahead, began to speak.

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	2. Chiaroscuro

_A/N: This chapter starts slowly. If you are the impatient type, scroll down till you find Valentine. If not...enjoy!_

_Readers familiar with my earlier fics will recognize this chapter as the basis for my Jace and Valentine short, Chiaroscuro — apologies for the repetition. Lots more new Jace and Clary stuff to come next chapter!_

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|o|

He was practising when the summons came, sitting at the rosewood piano that dominated the far end of the sunny room they called the Green Room — though the servants punctiliously insisted on 'the Music Room' — his fingers hurtling down the keyboard in a crashing spray of arpeggios.

The piece was too hard for him. But his father had instructed the music master to let him learn any piece he wanted, so long as he practised diligently. "He won't hurt himself," he'd said dryly. "If he doesn't mind the frustration, I don't see why you should."

So the music master had only pursed his lips disapprovingly and let Jace choose what he liked. The arpeggios were rapid and awkward, and his fingers tended to skid onto wrong notes as they flew along the keys, but he loved the feel of it: the reckless speed and the strength, the notes struck like sparks from his fingertips. And the sudden turn near the end, as the music alighted for a moment on a melody of such sweetness that it made him want to shout aloud, or turn handsprings, or cry — except that he was eight, and eight-year-olds didn't cry.

His fingers lost their way for a moment, cast about hopefully and then petered to a halt. With a sigh, he started again from the beginning, watching the music unreel beneath his hands with a kind of wordless pleasure. His arms and shoulders ached — yesterday's training session had been a punishing one. But bruises and sore muscles were a part of life he'd learned to ignore long ago.

The tricky passage where he kept getting stuck was coming up again, and he knew he ought to stop and work at it methodically. But he'd spent the past hour and half dutifully taking the music apart into smaller and smaller bits until it was in pieces like a clock with its gears strewn across the table. In the remaining minutes before lunch he just wanted to play: let the music loose to soar like a hawk released into the windswept sky.

The difficult part was almost on him now. From long experience, he knew better than to concentrate on getting it right. Fingers had a will of their own; if you paid them too much attention they got nervous and balked. You had to sneak up on it.

So he thought instead about the harmonies moving below the dancing notes like cloud-shadows on the hills, listened as they drew together, built and tautened — and then, in a flash, the dangerous moment was past and he was in the clear, hands sweeping in a glorious crescendo to the piece's conclusion.

He sat for a moment, hands still on the keys, as the last faint reverberations died away and his breathing gradually slowed.

A quiet tapping on the door made its way into his consciousness. His first thought, he remembered afterwards, was what excellent luck that it hadn't come any sooner and spoilt that last magnificent plunge to the finale.

His next was that for all he knew, it had. The thunderous bass notes would have drowned out any other sound — and his father's servants knew better than to enter a room without permission. Whoever it was could have been standing outside the door knocking for a while.

"Come in," he called out a little guiltily. Though of course he hadn't been expecting anyone. His father was strict about the hours he spent studying or practising, and he wasn't supposed to be interrupted.

But his father was away. It might, he thought hopefully, be someone from the kitchens with a picnic lunch he could take down to the river. The kitchen lads wouldn't care about a quarter of an hour shaved off his piano practice, so long as it went undiscovered.

Of course, his father had an unpleasant way of knowing about things. He might not be pleased about the unauthorized picnic either. Once, when he was much younger, Jace had coaxed one of the lads into taking him out exploring. He'd come home with a sprained ankle and a deep gash in his arm. Not that he'd minded — the spectacular view from on top of the stable cupola was worth any number of sprained ankles, in his opinion — but his father had made it categorically clear that he was not to spend time with the servants in future. Exactly what his father said or did to the kitchen boy he never found out, but it was months before any of them would so much as catch his eye. His father had had something to say to Jace about it too — he winced reflexively at the memory.

Even if today's river expedition was strictly solo, he had a feeling a special lunch from the kitchen might count as "fraternizing". Still, it was beautiful weather, perfect for building a dam in the shallows or practising with his spear on the carp that lurked in the shadows beneath the bridge. No point wasting time now worrying about future retribution.

But wasn't someone from the kitchen, after all. When Jace looked up, his father's manservant was standing in the doorway.

Which could only mean one thing: his father was home. His heart gave a little joyful bound. "You're back," he exclaimed unnecessarily, scrambling up from the piano bench.

The servant's impassive face softened fractionally, and he inclined his head. "We rode back this morning, Master Jonathan. Your father accomplished his business more quickly than he'd anticipated."

He nodded, unsurprised. His father was uncompromisingly punctual where his absences were concerned: if he said he'd be back by Thursday, he was back by Thursday. It often meant allowing more time for his journeys than he turned out to need.

So no picnic by the river. But lunch with his father in the long, panelled dining room, and a chance maybe to hear about his trip. Not that his father generally volunteered much information about where he went or what he did there — and Jace knew better than to ask. But his father had told him a little about this particular errand before he left.

And maybe, just maybe, his father would take him sailing this afternoon. It _was_ a glorious day, with a lively breeze blowing from the south.

He slid back onto the bench to get his last fifteen minutes of practicing done.

But the manservant was still speaking, colourless and deferential.

"Your father would like to see you, Master Jonathan. You'll find him in his study."

He felt a prickling of unease. His father almost never called him into his study, except to punish him. A swift examination of his conscience yielded no crimes as yet unpaid-for — no serious ones, anyway. He glanced over quickly, but the servant's face gave nothing away.

Closing the piano lid quietly, he followed the manservant out of the room. Whatever this might be about, his father didn't like to be kept waiting.

The green baize door of his father's study was shut. Ignoring the unpleasant hammering of his heart and the unwelcome recollection of other times he'd stood here, he raised his hand and knocked.

"Come in, Jonathan." Odd how a knock could be as recognizable as a footstep or a voice. Through the baize, his father's own voice was muffled, like the percussion of iron on wood. It was impossible to read its tone.

Squaring his shoulders, he pushed the door open.

His father's study was an imposing and elegant room: stately, orderly and still. Even the dust motes caught in the slanting sunlight from the tall windows seemed to hang motionless in the air, as though waiting for permission to resume their habitual dance. As always, it was the bookcases that struck you first: heavy, ledger-lined shelves towering to the ceiling. The library was lined with books too, of course, but the effect there was different — lighter, more open and at the same time somehow cozy: a place that invited you in, laid out its treasures for you, made you want to clamber up the ladders and pull out random interesting-looking volumes from high-up shelves.

The dark, brooding bookcases in his father's study kept their secrets to themselves. Maybe it was the depth of the room, and the vast height of the ceiling, vanishing into dimness, but this was a place that spoke of authority and power. It reminded him of his father at his most formidable: like him, a room not to be crossed lightly.

But Jace's eyes were on the massive desk by the window and the tall figure seated behind it, silhouetted against the bright sky. His father was writing, his face lost in shadow.

"Sit down, Jonathan," he said without looking up from his paper.

Swallowing, Jace crossed the expanse of carpet and perched obediently on the heavy chair by the desk, watching the lines of neat, balanced characters flow smoothly from his father's pen. His father was still dressed for riding, though he'd taken time to remove his greatcoat and wash off the dust of the roads. As usual, the starched points of his collar and the white line of cloth at his cuffs looked inhumanly fresh.

Jace wondered if he was in trouble for something, and if so what it was. But when he risked a glance at his father's face, he looked preoccupied, not displeased. Letting out his breath silently, he settled against the carved wood, folding his hands in his lap and trying not to fidget.

Something do with this latest trip maybe, he thought sagely. A Nepalese warlock up in the north country, his father had said, claiming to have information about a cleft between dimensions: some kind of spy-hole into the demonic realms. He wondered whether his father's enquiries had been successful and if he was planning a trip to the Himalayas, or wherever this dimensional rift was supposed to be. And if so, whether he'd take him along. A crack between dimensions sounded exciting. He wondered if you could actually see the demon worlds through the rift — and if demons could come pouring out through it.

Suppressing a shiver, he gazed for a moment at his father's strong, scarred fingers driving the pen across the page and pictured them wrapped around a blazing seraph blade, inky Marks curving to his cuffs and demons surging around him. He couldn't imagine any demon that could get the better of his father, but it was still a sobering thought.

The flying pen paused, scribbled half a line more and then came to a halt. Laying down his pen, his father sat back and gazed at him thoughtfully.

"I wanted to talk to you, Jonathan. I think it's time."

_Time? _he thought in confusion._ Time for what?_ His bewilderment must have shown on his face, because his father held up a hand to forestall him.

"You turn nine next month, Jonathan. At Easter, you despatched a demon, single-handed. You've trained in every manner of combat imaginable — bow and rapier, dagger and spear, slingshot and stiletto. You've learnt to master cold, thirst and hunger, to bear fatigue and pain. You know how to kill a man."

Jace shifted uncomfortably in his chair. Something in the seriousness of his father's voice sent a trickle of apprehension down his spine. He could feel the weight of his black gaze resting on him, heavy as iron.

"I imagine you haven't given much thought to this, Jonathan, but you're ready to put your skills into practice. To begin hunting demons." He rose as he spoke, and his broad shoulders seemed to tower against the window, blotting out the light. "It's time that you were Marked."

Jace stared. For an instant, astonishment swept aside every other feeling. "But I thought Shadowhunter children didn't get Marked until they were twelve," he stammered. "When they go away to school." Whatever he'd expected his father to say, it wasn't this.

"Most Shadowhunter children don't." Something flickered in his father's eyes for an instant and was gone.

"But you're not like most Shadowhunter children, Jonathan." He frowned slightly. "Though I suppose you couldn't know that." He had taken up the chased silver letter-knife from his desk, and was balancing it lightly between his long fingers, his gaze on the narrow blade as he spoke.

Now he looked up, and his mouth relaxed into the shadow of a smile. "Trust me, Jonathan, one would search long and hard through Idris to find a twelve-year-old who is your equal in skill or training." Beneath the tranquil certainty, a trace of satisfaction was audible in his level voice.

Jace supposed it was possible — his father certainly made him train hard enough. It hadn't really occurred to him that other children might not be as well-schooled as he was. He realized he had a very vague notion of what it would be like to grow up in the crowded precincts of the Glass City, without the solitude and amenities — the mews and stables, the butts for archery, the vast training room and armoury, the fields and woods, lakes and rivers — he took for granted. He could see he had advantages, growing up here on the manor with his father, which other children didn't have.

But ready to be Marked? He struggled to collect his thoughts and remember what he knew about a Shadowhunter's first Marks. His recollection was hazy. The whole thing had always belonged to a far-off future, too remote to give much thought to.

He knew the runes, of course, the permanent Marks every Shadowhunter bore. His father made him spend hours at the long table in the library studying from the Grey Book until his head ached and runes danced in bright afterimages behind his closed eyelids. There wasn't a basic Mark by now he couldn't recognize and reproduce from memory.

He knew too that this was part of growing up. You didn't draw runes on young children — apart from _iratzes,_ the healing runes that did their work and disappeared without a trace — any more than you did on Downworlders or mundanes. The runes were too powerful. Getting Marked was something that happened when you were old enough: at school usually — at least if you grew up in Idris and could go away to school in Alicante. He knew there were Shadowhunter children — not many — whose parents chose to raise them out in the mundane world: his father's old _parabatai,_ for instance. He wondered if there were any schools for them or if they were taught at home. Perhaps there weren't any hard and fast rules about when they were Marked.

Gripping his elbows with his hands, he stared out the window at the sunlit lawns rolling down to the river and thought about whether he felt grown up. He remembered the Glabrous demon he'd fought in King's College Chapel: the thick, evil sound of its chittering, refracted into a dozen whispers by the echoing stone, the greedy anticipation in its eye as it clambered towards him, the slithery weight descending on his chest as it sprang. He could remember wondering in the instant between drawing his dagger and seeing it launch itself at him, why he hadn't called out for help. Maybe he _was_ growing up.

His father seemed to think so, anyway. He wished he knew more about what happened when you were Marked for the first time — and then thought maybe he didn't. He wanted to ask his father: _when?_

The minute he framed the question, the answer came to him with a little cold thrill. He swallowed.

"You mean right now, don't you?" With an effort, he made the words come out quiet and steady.

"Obviously." His father's voice was edged with impatience. "Why else would we be having this conversation?"

_Obviously_. He flushed and wished he could take back the question. He wished his breath weren't suddenly so short in his chest. He wished he were sitting at the long mahogany dining table, helping himself to roast beef and potatoes and listening to his father talk about Milton, or the heroic exploits of the great crusading Shadowhunters, or, well, anything really.

His father's gaze travelled over him and his brows drew together in a frown.

"Jonathan," he said more sharply. "Do you suppose I would do this if I didn't think you were ready? To fight demons, you need Marks to strengthen and protect you. What happened at Easter was unexpected, but in hindsight I see that the risk was always there. You could easily have been killed." His fingers were gripped on the window frame, his eyes fixed on something Jace couldn't see. "Very easily," he repeated half to himself.

When he turned, the expression on his face was unexpectedly grim. "I want you properly armed the next time you meet a demon, Jonathan. And travelling with me, you _will_ encounter demons again.

"The Marks a Shadowhunter bears are the strongest armour he possesses. Nature has endowed demons with weapons and defences we can't begin to match, hideous powers beyond your imagining. All we have are the Angel's Marks on our bodies — for strength and speed and agility, to heal us and help us bear pain." The quiet passion in his voice surprised Jace.

And it was true. It had been a _very_ near thing when he'd tackled the demon in King's Chapel, nearer than he liked to remember. Strengthening runes would have helped a lot.

So he looked at his father steadily and said "Yes, Father, I can see that."

His father gazed back at him for a moment measuringly, and then he nodded as though satisfied with what he saw. "Good." A brief smile lit his austere, fine-boned face, like sun in winter. For an instant Jace was five again, poised at the end of the dock for his first dive into the dark waters of the lake, his father strong and tall and assured beside him like the Angel in the illustrations.

But these were deeper waters than any he'd swum in. In spite of himself, he felt his heart accelerate, his palms damp against the carved wood of his chair. He drew a long steadying breath, pushing the fear back the way he'd been taught, and wondered if his father had noticed.

But when he looked up, his father's face was shuttered, his gaze flat and unreadable. Jace looked away. After the bright sunlight outside the window, the room seemed dim and still. The mahogany surface of the desk shone like a dark mirror; he could see his father's reflection glimmering fathoms deep in the polished wood. Over the hammer strokes of his heart he heard his father's voice saying something, cool and remote.

Then he was standing over him, stele in his hand. "Your left hand I think, Jonathan."

It was going to hurt. His father's eyes and voice told him that. He felt his muscles harden as he braced himself, hands gripped tight on the arms of the chair. His father's cool fingers circled his wrist like bands of iron.

_"In the name of the Angel, by whom are charged with the safety of this mortal world—"_

He took a deep breath, concentrating on his father's voice.

_"— I Mark you now a Shadowhunter, Jonathan — now and always." _

The words hung in the air like ripples spreading across water. He knew he ought to look away, but a kind of horrified fascination held him transfixed as his father bent and brought the glowing tip of the stele down against his skin.

The pain was shocking. He gave a little gasp, his fingers cramped hard against the polished wood, and felt his father's fingers tighten ruthlessly around his wrist. Smoke curled lazily towards the ceiling as the stele traced its agonizing path across his hand.

_"_Close your eyes, Jonathan." His father's voice cut levelly across the rising dazzlement of pain."Pain is only what you allow it to be."

Shutting his eyes valiantly, he tried to find a place beyond the pain, make it a thing apart. He was Nephilim: you didn't think about how much something hurt.

But his hand was twisting and contorting into impossible shapes, as though recoiling from the stele of its own will. He heard a bone splinter and then another, and a white blaze of agony engulfed his hand. He doubled over, choking.

He was dimly aware of his father pulling him into his arms and the sound of someone screaming, and then he was falling down into an abyss of blinding agony that seemed to go on and on without end. Until at last, quite suddenly, he reached the blackness at the bottom.

|o|

Looking back later, he couldn't recall an actual moment of awakening, only a slow upwelling of consciousness bearing him gradually back to awareness: a timeless interval reaching back as far as he could remember. He had a hazy sense of a time even further beyond that, and a long ascent out of excruciating darkness. Demons, he thought vaguely: down in the black depths where he'd been. That couldn't be right, but it was hard to think through the pounding ache in his head.

He seemed to be lying on his side, his head pillowed on something soft. His whole body felt stiff and aching as though he'd been lying a long time on cold stone, but when he shifted a fraction, experimentally, it was clear that whatever lay beneath him was more yielding than that. Why couldn't he remember where he was? His left hand throbbed with a smothered sort of pain, as though muffled under thick blankets.

With an effort, he dragged his eyelids open. Dimness surrounded him, punctuated by mellow pools of lamplight. He was on a sofa, if seemed, its brown leather rosy in the glow of the lamps. With a stab of bewilderment he recognized the long Chesterfield in his father's study. Beyond the tall windows, the sky was a deep cobalt blue, the trees inky shadows against the dusk.

He struggled into a sitting position, and was rewarded by a wave of dizziness that nearly sent him toppling back into darkness.

"Easy, Jonathan."

His father was sitting in a pool of light beyond the sofa, a book open on his knee. His face was impossible to read in the uneven light.

Memory returned abruptly as a falcon stooping from the sky, and transfixed him with its talons. He drew a sharp breath, his eyes flying involuntarily to his hand, but it was invisible under layers of white linen.

"I reset the bones and splinted it for now." His father's voice was unemphatic. "There's a light _iratze_ on it, but it will take a few days to mend — I didn't think a powerful healing rune was the best idea at the moment. The wrappings are for the poultice; they can come off in the morning."

He nodded, eyes on the floor. A sick feeling was seeping through him, his lungs suddenly tight as if there weren't enough air in the room. Beneath the linen bands, his hand burned painfully.

He looked up to see his father watching him.

"Jonathan—" His father hesitated a moment, and then rose. Bending smoothly, he lifted Jace up and sat him on the high sideboard so that his eyes were nearly level with his own. Jace could see his own white face glimmering in their depths.

"Jonathan," he began again, his voice soft and urgent. "What happened was my fault. _Not yours._" The dark eyes burned into his as if they could compel belief by sheer force of will.

"The Marks I chose were far too powerful for a body as young as yours. I was so intent on ensuring you had the protection you need that I failed to think. It was inexcusable stupidity." Self-reproach twisted bitterly in his voice.

For an instant, his hands rested lightly on Jace's shoulders, their grip warm and solid on Jace's chilled flesh. "There's nothing the matter with your courage, Jonathan." His voice grated. "Nothing _whatsoever_."

"I'm proud of you," he added quietly. "And I'm so very sorry I put you through that."

Jace felt the cold knot in his middle loosen a little. The sincerity in his father's voice was unmistakable. He looked down, picking at a loose thread on his knee with his good hand.

"It's not meant to hurt that much?"

"Not like that." The beginnings of a smile crinkled the corners of his father's eyes in the way he loved. "Or to break your bones. Not if I'd done it right. Covenant Marks shouldn't be anything like that painful."

Jace was silent a moment.

"It's not just that I'm too young? To be Marked at all?"

"Days and years are arbitrary counters, Jonathan. What matters is what you've done with them." The low, resonant voice seemed to fill the room, sweeping back the long shadows which hovered beyond the circle of lamplight.

"Your fortitude and resilience, your courage, your skill, all those things which go into the making of a Shadowhunter—" He hesitated as if searching for words, his gaze on Jace's upturned face. Jace waited.

"Well, suffice it to say," he finished slowly, "they are far beyond your natural years." His eyes rested on Jace, the shadow of some indecipherable thought in their depths. "Beyond what anyone could ask." His voice was so low he might have been talking to himself.

"Believe me, Jonathan," he went on, stretching out his hand so the lamplight shone full on the curving lines etched blackly across it. "I was no readier the day I received these Marks than you are today."

Jace gazed at the inky patterns, as achingly familiar as the sound of his own name. He could picture it with his eyes shut: the hand at the bridle of his pony — steadying him as he climbed into the swaying aspens by the barn — flashing beneath a blade up and down the length of the training room — tracing beneath the lines of Latin verse as he parsed. Strange to think it had once been bare and unmarked like his own. But then, he couldn't really imagine his father as a boy.

"So you hadn't already fought loads of demons by the time you went to school?" He thought for a moment.

"But you were twelve, right? Did you still need reminding to be patient and not overreach your own strength and match your footwork to your weapon strokes? And get into trouble for things, like climbing the stable weathervane or raiding the apple cellar?

His father threw back his head and laughed. "Eight-year-olds don't have a monopoly on mischief, Jonathan — though I never climbed that particular weathervane. As for demons, it's an unlucky child who meets with a demon before he's been Marked."

He gazed down at him and smiled: a rare, open, unshadowed smile. "I had a very conventional childhood, Jonathan. Old-fashioned in many respects, I suppose." His voice was reflective. "My father believed in traditional Shadowhunter ways and insisted on training me in the old arts. But I knew far less of the world and its dangers than you do." There was a trace of regret in his voice, though whether it was for himself or for Jace it was hard to tell.

He touched Jace's cheek lightly with his finger. "There's nothing I could do then that you can't do, Jonathan — I promise." The conviction in his voice blazed softly, warm as sunlight spilling across the golden stone of the manor terrace.

Jace looked at him searchingly a moment, and then relaxed. _I promise_, in his father's vocabulary, meant exactly that. He lifted his chin.

"Then I want to try again. Now."

His father scanned his face for a long moment, and then held out his hand.

Jace put his good hand carefully into his father's. For an instant he gazed at his own small hand cradled in his father's broad, calloused palm — and then he obediently closed his eyes.

|o|


	3. Reflections

_A/N: The first dozen paragraphs of this chapter are taken from my one-shot Chiaroscuro — but after that, it's all new!_

* * *

|o|

"And this time _was_ different," Jace said thoughtfully. "Just as he'd promised. It hurt — I was still very young to be Marked. But no worse than some of the injuries I'd gotten before."

Clary pictured the small, stalwart figure braced against the pain and felt her nails digging into her palms.

"So at least the Marks he used the second time around were the right ones?" She couldn't quite keep the anger out of her voice. How could anyone make such a terrible mistake and hurt their own child so badly?

"No," said Jace quietly, "they weren't. That's the point. The Marks he'd used the first time were already the lightest possible ones he could have chosen. I just didn't know that. The problem wasn't the Marks, it was me. I was eight years old. Shadowhunter children get Marked for the first time when they're twelve. Maybe ten, if they're really exceptional.

"Obviously, I was exceptional—" for a second, a pleased expression tugged at the corners of his mouth and Clary couldn't help thinking with a little pang how long it was since she'd seen that look of effortless superiority on Jace's face.

"There aren't many Shadowhunter kids either who've had the kind of training he put me through," he continued. "But I was still much too young, and he knew it."

"So why did he do it?' Clary demanded. "Another typical episode of gratuitous cruelty?" Thinking about Jace's childhood with Valentine still made her hot and miserable, like she wanted to pull him close and smother him in stupid endearments — or hit someone.

When she looked up, Jace's eyes were dark with some unreadable emotion.

"It wasn't cruelty, Clary. Arrogance maybe. He did it because he didn't think there was anything he couldn't do. Because he didn't think there was anything _I _couldn't do. He did it because he believed in me." With an abrupt movement, he rose to his feet and stood with his hands on the iron railing by the river, gazing down at the fast-flowing grey water below.

"That's insane," Clary burst out. "I mean, how twisted is that? Torturing a child, just to prove you're capable of pushing them beyond the limits of human nature."

Jace turned and looked at her, a steady, measured look. "A bit late for that, don't you think? He'd made me into something beyond human nature before I was even born. But look, you're missing the point — _he was right._ His belief in himself — in me — was justified.

"The Marks he gave me that second time weren't any different. _But I was._ Because I trusted him."

Clary gazed at him wordlessly, her hands twisted together in her lap.

"Don't you see, Clary? It's fear that makes the Marks hard to bear, at least partly; fear that makes the body fight against the power of the runes — fear that is literally crippling. That's why we go through so much specialized training before we're Marked for the first time. Most of our training is about fighting, obviously — technical stuff — and there are techniques for handling pain; but a lot is to do with fear. It's one reason why you don't put Marks on young children. Being afraid is something kids grow out of. To an extent, anyway."

In her mind's eye, Clary pictured Jace standing straight-backed in her foyer, laughing in the face of Abbadon, Demon of the Abyss. The blistering courage of it still caught her by the throat. Growing up was the least of it, she thought.

But Jace was speaking again. "He thought I could do it cold, and he was wrong. My body and mind were just too young. I knew how to be brave in the face of my fear, but I couldn't go one step further and be fearless. An eight-year-old's courage has its limits.

"But he had absolute faith in me, Clary, and that faith made it possible for me to be unafraid. To have faith in myself, to trust that the Marks he gave me would not be more than I could bear. And because I believed it — it was true."

Clary looked away. The thought of Valentine believing in Jace — understanding his son deeply enough to see him through his ordeal, _knowing_ him the way her own mother knew her, through and through — wasn't one she could bear to look at too closely. It came a little too near to love.

She recognized, reluctantly, that whatever Valentine had done to him as a child, Jace had loved his father. Still loved him, in some way. But when she thought, really thought, about the idea that, in his way, Valentine had loved Jace too —

Clary shuddered, grief and horror breaking over her in a dark wave, and she tugged her raincoat more tightly around her body, so that the slithery fabric rustled loudly in her ears, blotting out the soft slap of the river against the concrete embankment, so unexpectedly like the little waves piling onto the shore of Lake Lyn.

There were parts of what had happened there she couldn't bear to share with anyone, not even Jace. Especially not Jace. Images seared as indelibly in her memory as if they'd been burnt there with the red-hot tip of a stele. You didn't need runes, she thought, to be Marked permanently.

Jace's face was turned away from her, his pale hair tangled against his cheeks, the red Marks of mourning he wore for Max twining round his collarbones. The artist in her caught her breath at the purity of his profile, the wide planes of his cheekbones, the fine-drawn curve of his jaw. There were blue shadows lying beneath his impossibly long lashes, and tiny lines of strain at the corners of his mouth she hadn't noticed before. He looked, Clary thought, like he hadn't slept properly in a long time.

She watched as he stared silently down the waves to where the girdered span of Queensboro bridge hung like a portcullis across the river, closing off the horizon. Beneath it, she could just make out the crouching bulk of Renwick's where Jace had found his father and lost him again, and the dark stretch of water beyond, where Valentine's demon ship had lurked, and Jace had walked away from his father in his turn.

His father, who had looked after Jace as a little boy, made him who he was. Who had loved him, hurt him, lied to him, abandoned him — and killed him.

_Killed him — killed him — killed him._

And held him close, like a child in his arms, while he died.

Clary kicked aside the shards of Jace's soda can with a kind of desperation, and went to his side by the railing. Jace's arm settled around her almost absently, but in the right way, the way you'd unthinkingly tuck a straying lock of hair back where it belonged. With a relief that was almost physical, Clary buried her face against his shoulder, letting the strong, steady rhythm of Jace's heartbeat drown out the terrible refrain echoing in her ears.

His other hand slid around her, pulling her closer.

"Clary?"

His abstraction had gone. She could feel the prickling of his concern like soft, sharp snowflakes on her skin, and wondered a little helplessly whether it was the tension in her shoulders that gave her away, or just some sixth sense of Jace's.

"I hate it when you go quiet." His breath stirred her hair. "It's the one place I can't go with you."

_No, and thank goodness you can't,_ Clary thought. Though it seemed sometimes like Jace could read her with a single sidelong glance, know what she was thinking before she even knew herself. She'd never felt this way with anyone before, as though the boundaries between yourself and the person you loved had begun to blur and run together like watercolours. It gave her a strange, dizzying feeling of security — like walking in through her apartment door at the end of a long day. Was that how her mother and Luke felt about each other, she wondered?

Had her mother felt like this once with Valentine?

For an instant, the image rose up in Clary's mind of a pitiless face, empty and cold as the waters of Lake Lyn, and she felt the familiar lurch in the pit of her stomach, long fingers twisting disagreeably inside her. Someday, she supposed, she'd get over it, this sick feeling whenever she let herself think about — she forced herself to finish the thought — _her parents._ No amount of wishing would alter the past, or change the blood that ran like a dark current in her veins.

And maybe it didn't matter. As Luke kept insisting to her, she was who she was. The things that had happened this summer didn't make Valentine any more a part of her than he had been before. Or any less a part of Jace, she thought with a little wave of sadness.

With a sigh, she threaded her hand through Jace's. His fingers were icy from the cold iron railing, and she twined her own warm fingers more tightly around them, starting a little as the freezing metal of the Morgenstern ring touched her skin. She had given it back it to Jace when they returned from Idris. She wasn't sure when he had taken to wearing it again. In the dull grey light, the Marks Valentine had carved into his hand stood out blackly against his skin, as dark and fresh as if they had been drawn yesterday.

"Tell me something," she said slowly. "When did you first realize the truth?"

"The truth?" Jace echoed, confused.

"About what happened, that it had nothing to do with the Marks that Valentine had chosen to use. That the problem was that you were too young, and he'd handled it all wrong."

_That he'd lied to you,_ thought Clary, but she didn't say it out loud.

Jace gave her a shrewd look and Clary got the feeling he guessed exactly what she wasn't saying. But he only said, "Not till much later, when we were studying the Covenant Marks with Hodge. We pretty much did runes to death those first few years. Alec and Isabelle hadn't been Marked yet, of course, so we did every conceivable lesson in preparation.

"The ones Valentine didn't bother to do with you." She could feel herself scowling.

He laughed at her expression. "It's hardly a fair comparison, Clary. This is Hodge we're talking about, remember? Lessons were practically his lifeblood. He'd dig up obscure books for us to study the way a Raum demon chases down its prey."

It was probably true; she'd had teachers at school like that. In his pedantic way, Clary thought with a flicker of envy and regret, Hodge had probably been an amazing teacher. She'd never know now.

"Anyway, I'd had years more practice and training than Alec or Isabelle," Jace pointed out. "Even at the age of eight." By unspoken agreement, they had begun walking slowly back uptown, heads bent into the freshening wind.

"Though," he added thoughtfully, "I'm not sure my father exactly planned on doing it when he did, either." It was noticeable, thought Clary, that when Jace talked about his childhood, it was always "my father", not "Valentine".

"I think the demon in Cambridge was a shock. And then this Himalayan expedition came along and he just thought: _Now. _We did end up going to the crevasse. It was amazing. I've never seen anything like it."

His expression tightened. "Not until three weeks ago, anyway. I suppose that's where he got the idea for whatever trapdoor into hell it was that he opened in the caves by Lake Lyn."

They skirted a stand of trees in silence, dead leaves and litter skittering about their feet in the rising wind, and Clary tried to imagine what it was like to look at Valentine and see him with Jace's double vision like a twice-exposed photograph: the splendid, formidable, compelling father he'd worshipped as a child, and the monster that Valentine became.

Or always was. Clary thought of Ithuriel chained in the dark beneath that sunlit music room, and the other bones they'd found in the cellars. While above, a dauntless, warm-hearted little boy scampered in his father's wake, his stern schooling in fortitude and obedience illuminated from within by love. How could you even begin to get those two pictures into the same frame?

Of course Valentine wasn't even really Jace's father. Clary wondered a little blankly whether that made it better or worse.

A freezing raindrop struck her cheek, yanking her back to the windy East River. The clouds had descended almost to the ground now, swallowing up the top floors of the apartment buildings and smudging the far side of the river to a grey blur. A murky, purplish gloom hung over the city, more like dusk than midday.

"Great day for a picnic," said Jace, slowing to zip up his jacket. "Have you considered a career in events planning?" He sounded like he was smiling. Reaching out a hand, he twitched her hood up and surveyed the lowering skies thoughtfully. The tense look had faded from his eyes, though Clary thought she could hear a lingering note of strain in his voice.

Another drop of rain struck her face, and then a third. Jace cast a rapid glance up the deserted promenade.

"Over there — look."

Half a block uptown, a new-looking arbor jutted out into the river — installed, thought Clary, by some optimistic city planner who thought money and the irresistible dynamic of urban renewal could make plants grow on soot and sea breeze. Wisteria had crept tentatively out over one end, like a child climbing cautiously on a high jungle gym. The faded foliage wouldn't give a lot of cover, but it was better than staying out in the open.

As if underlining her thought, the wind hurled a stinging handful of rain in their faces. Clary grabbed Jace's hand and fled towards the arbor, dark spots blooming on the grey cobblestones as they ran.

|o|

The paving had been relaid here as part of the new construction, its hexagonal honeycomb of cobbles crisp and smooth. Beneath the arbor's cedar beams, a handful of high-concept table-and-chair fixtures were artfully clustered, their brushed metal perforated like giant cheese graters. Clary supposed it was meant to give them a modernist feel. They didn't look very comfortable.

Jace eyed the fixtures dubiously before perching on one of the tables where the yellowing leaves hung thickest, his booted feet propped on one of the seats. After a moment's hesitation, Clary sat beside him, pushing her damp hood back from her face. The percussion of the rain on the metal tables at the open end of the arbor filled the air with a noise like a hundred badly-tuned kettle drums. You could smell the water incredibly strongly here, the clinging scent of seasalt and sewers, familiar as childhood. She still found it disconcerting — ridiculously — that the river here had the same smell as the rock-bound Brooklyn waterfront she'd known her whole life: one suspension bridge and a hundred million irretrievable light-years away.

When she looked up, Jace was watching her silently, his eyes very gentle as if he guessed what she was thinking. _How does he know?_ thought Clary, shaken again by the queer intuition of it, as though her mind were as open and transparent to him as an uncurtained window. His hair was beaded with rain, springing round his face in featherings of white gold like the curls of a Piero della Francesca angel. She wondered what else he could read in her face.

"Anyway," he resumed softly after a moment, "I did work out the truth eventually. It was pretty obvious from Hodge's lessons that it couldn't have been the runes my father used that made the difference."

Clary pictured Jace looking up silently from the pages of his book — seated at a desk? in the library? was there a schoolroom somewhere in the Institute? — comprehension dawning on his closed face. She wondered if he'd ever told anyone.

"Hodge guessed," Jace said, answering her thought. "I mean, it was obvious when I arrived at the Institute that I had been Marked already — but it's not totally unheard-of for children to get their first Marks when they're ten. So I let them all believe that.

"But I think I must have said something that gave away what had happened. Or what I _thought_ had happened," he amended. He had picked up a spray of wisteria brought down by the wind and was playing with it as he spoke, winding the flexible stem round and round in his long, pianist's fingers.

"Though I suppose," he added slowly, "Hodge might have guessed anyway." For a moment the bitterness showed in his voice. "I keep forgetting he knew exactly who my father was, and what he was capable of. I don't know how much he ever told the others."

But Clary was only half-listening, struck by a new thought.

"So _that's_ what Hodge meant," she exclaimed, "when he said that you of all people should have known better."

Jace looked blank.

"When you told him about the Invisibility rune you put on me after the Ravener attack in my apartment, remember? And he went ballistic."

Jace frowned. "Hodge was right: I did know better."

He was silent for a moment, looking down at the twisted vine in his hand, and when he spoke again his voice was hard.

"I was terrified that you were going to die, Clary. It was my fault the Ravener got anywhere near you in the first place — it would never have happened if I hadn't been stupid enough to let you go running off on your own." He brushed a stray curl mechanically back from her face, his eyes bleak.

"I would have put myself through anything to keep you safe. But you were the one I had to risk hurting. And if I'd guessed wrong—" He closed his eyes for a moment, and Clary saw that his fingers were white to the bone where they were gripped on the edge of the table.

"But you weren't wrong," she said softly. "Quit torturing yourself, Jace." With gentle fingers, she pried his hand loose and held it to her cheek. "And what you told Hodge was true: it probably saved my life."

Jace went on as if she hadn't spoken. "I convinced myself it was impossible that you could be anything but a Shadowhunter. I had to believe it; I was desperate. But it was sheer arrogance. I could have hurt you terribly, Clary."

Curling his fingers round hers, he drew her hand down and turned it over so they could both see the pale traces of the rune he'd drawn peeking out beneath the narrow band of her watchstrap.

"And I slapped you for it." Her lips curved, remembering.

"You did." The tight lines of Jace's face eased into a reluctant smile. "Trust me, I haven't forgotten. Did Luke teach you that?"

Clary grinned back, relieved. "In eighth grade. Said it might come in useful with boys who got out of line." She could still see Luke's blue eyes gleaming behind his spectacles with irony and affection. Strange that she'd never given it a second thought — her mother's gentle, bookish friend showing her how to use the flat of her hand so effectively. It struck her with a little jolt that maybe Robert and Maryse weren't quite her first Shadowhunter instructors after all. Luke doing his best, thought Clary, to keep faith with both her and Jocelyn.

Sighing, she leaned back onto her hands and looked up at Jace, the cold, perforated metal of the table pressing patterns into her flesh. Two childhoods built around elaborate falsehoods, she thought. Masquerades as different as they could possibly be — it was hard to picture Jace's warrior upbringing with Valentine on the same planet, even, as her own ordinary New York childhood of playgrounds and homework and Ben & Jerry's waffle cones on the way home from school. But both fabricated to cover over the same ruinous truth.

At least her own mother had done everything she did trying to keep her safe. Whereas Valentine — it seemed like Valentine had hurt Jace at every opportunity.

Clary jabbed at her chair with the toe of her sneaker, bitterness welling up inside her chest in a corrosive tide. Jace was absorbed in retying one of his boots, his fair head bent: an operation that seemed to involve an improbable succession of hooks and eyelets and small metal fastenings she couldn't put a name to. For serious lacing, Clary thought, Shadowhunter footwear left The North Face in the dust.

The rain was falling in silver curtains now beyond their small island of shelter, closing around them like diaphanous hangings around a four-poster bed. Rainwater had pooled into a broad puddle on the cobbles below them, its surface scored into tiny ripples by the wind. Clary stared down at her corrugated reflection, Jace's beautiful, self-contained face glimmering in the water beside her. Somewhere on East End, a distant taxi honked.

"But you weren't mad at your father?" she found herself asking. "When you realized what he'd done? He took a crazy risk with _you_, Jace. And he did hurt you — horribly." Clary could feel her teeth set, thinking about it. "He didn't even have the courage to tell you the truth afterwards."

The anger was back in her voice, and a part of her wondered why she was trying to pick a fight with Jace. Because he was there and Valentine wasn't, maybe.

Jace shook his head. In the dim light, his profile looked calm, composed.

"No, I wasn't," he said simply. "I don't know what that tells you, maybe just that he was my father and he was dead and I wasn't ready to think badly of anything he did." Stretching out his hand, he stared for a moment thoughtfully at the curling symbols etched into his skin.

"But I think maybe at some level I'd always sort of known. The second time _felt_ different, Clary. I knew I was going to be all right, before the stele even touched my skin."

"But Jace," she couldn't help asking, "why did he get it so wrong the first time around?" It made no sense. Valentine was a master of manipulation: she'd experienced it herself, the overwhelming power of that seductive tongue. It would have been ridiculously easy for Valentine to reassure his son and lend him the confidence he needed.

"I mean, everyone talks about Valentine as a born leader, someone who inspired people without even trying." Clary wrinkled her brow in bewilderment. "Luke told me once that he had an awful time when he first started school in Alicante — couldn't do his lessons or bear even the lightest Marks. He said it was Valentine who rescued him, gave him the self-confidence to cope. Same with Hodge, and Robert Lightwood and probably loads of others. He would have known _exactly_ how to help a frightened child facing their first Marks. How could he mess things up so badly when it came to his own son?"

"I don't know. It's a good question." Jace shrugged. "I suppose there's no way of knowing, now. Why did my father do anything?"

But that was a cop-out, and he must have known it, because after a moment he looked up and said, "If I had to guess though, I think maybe he didn't have the same detachment where I was concerned."

"You think the problem was that he wasn't callous _enough?_" She could hear the disbelief in her own voice.

"Sounds ridiculous, doesn't it?" Jace said flatly. "But yes. Something like that. I think he didn't much like hurting me and he knew he was going to have to — quite a lot. Maybe he didn't like lying to me either, and he'd have to do that too."

Clary stared at him incredulously.

"I know, you're going to say: what _didn't_ he lie to me about? But Clary, my father didn't lie to me about ordinary things — ever. If anything, he was mercilessly truthful. No matter how unpleasant the truth might be to hear."

In her mind, Clary could hear Isabelle saying: "Don't ask Jace a question unless you think you can stand the answer." It was obvious, once you thought about it, where he had got that trait of brutal honesty from. No wonder he'd found it so hard that night at Renwick's to believe that everything Valentine was saying to him was a lie.

And that was only the first of the blows to fall, she thought, staring out into the rain. On the river, a vast tanker was sliding inexorably across the view like a shutter, slowly blotting out the decaying Queens waterfront with its rusting bulk.

"Let me get this straight," Clary said carefully. "You're saying that if Valentine had been a better liar, he wouldn't have put you through that?"

"I'm saying if it hadn't been me, it would have been easier for him to say and do all the facile, untruthful, heartlessly reassuring things he did with Luke and the others." He was silent a moment, his eyes dark with memory. "He wasn't the one who was going to have to actually Mark them, either."

"_And_ they weren't eight years old, and way too young to be Marked," Clary couldn't help pointing out. Out on the river, the tanker boomed out its low, overwhelming note across the water, making Clary's bones vibrate inside her chest.

"And they weren't eight years old," Jace agreed. He sounded suddenly tired — Clary would almost have said defeated, in some way she didn't understand. "The fact is, it was going to be pretty unpleasant for both of us. I think maybe he found it hard to pretend anything else — to me or to himself. "

Clary thought about this a moment. In a way she could see it. Retreating behind that wall of impassivity, where the ache of empathy couldn't touch him — that was totally Valentine.

"I bet he told himself that it was better for you to face your fears on your own. It would fit his screwy ideas about how you prepare a child for life." Of course her mother had gone to the opposite extreme. But she would still take her childhood over Jace's any day.

"He probably did," Jace agreed gravely. Clary looked up at his too-still face, and thought about the streak of calculated brutality that ran like a poisonous thread through Jace's childhood. She'd never been able to get past the brutality. But maybe the calculation was just as important. It occurred to her for the first time that Valentine had probably believed he was doing his best by his son.

Only...

"He just ended up hurting you so much more," she said bitterly.

"I know. It didn't work out too well for either of us. But I can see why it happened." Jace spoke slowly, as if he were thinking it through for the first time. "I think his self-reproach was genuine, and his apologies. He had failed me — and he knew why."

_To love is to destroy,_ Clary thought. Maybe if you were Valentine, it was true.

And in his damaged way, Valentine _had_ loved Jace, hadn't he? To the very last. Clary could hear the Angel's contemptuous words echoing in her ears. _God asked Abraham to sacrifice his son to see who it was that Abraham loved more, Isaac or God. But no one asked you to sacrifice your son, Valentine._

But that was beside the point, wasn't it? Valentine _thought_ God had. He'd believed that the choice he faced was Abraham's choice.

And nothing less than that, thought Clary, her throat tight, nothing short of Valentine's insane conviction that he'd been charged by heaven with saving the world — nothing less than the world itself, with all its crowded cities and teeming oceans and forests seething with life — could have weighed more in the balance than his love for his son.

It was a love edged like a blade and hard as iron, a love so steely and disciplined that it was almost unrecognizable. But there wasn't the slightest room for doubt, was there, that Jace had grown up loved? In her mind's eye, Clary saw him turning that fragment of the Portal over and over in his hands, shattered remnant of a lost Eden. However brutal and frightening a father Valentine might have been, it couldn't have been a loveless childhood that Jace so wistfully remembered.

She had spoken dismissively to Sebastian about the little bits of kindness and love Valentine had shown Jace. But that was too simplistic, Clary thought with belated wisdom. Maybe what people showed didn't matter so much as what they felt. Because you couldn't keep what you felt from seeping round the edges, like light under a door — even if you were Valentine. Even if you passionately believed that love was a weakness and did everything in your power to root it out.

Tears pricked at the back of her eyes. It was all there in the story which Jace had reluctantly told her: the love and the pain and the arrogant and absolute belief; the ruthlessness and the terrible, unexpected susceptibility; the twisted path of good intentions and the bottomless abyss of hurt.

Maybe love wasn't something that could be rewritten out of Jace's childhood any more than her own, thought Clary reluctantly. Not even now. Not even after everything that had happened.

_And Jace knows that, _she thought. _ Surely he must know._


	4. Water Under the Bridge

But when Clary looked over at Jace, he was staring unseeing at the gulls circling watchfully above the river like bleached birds of carrion, pale as Shadowhunter clothes of mourning. The rain was coming down in torrents now, forcing its way through the tangle of vines overhead and turning the wide cobbled ribbon of the promenade into a shining river of its own, the sky reflected grey on grey in its fretted surface.

"I think it might be one of the only times I ever heard my father apologise," he said almost to himself, eyes still fixed on the rain-swept waves.

Clary felt her heart contract.

Because that came appallingly close to what they were not going to talk about. What they had spent the last weeks doggedly pushing away to the margins of every conversation, though it hovered on dark wings over everything they said and did.

_But he obviously doesn't remember that part,_ thought Clary with a kind of desperate relief. It was confirmation of what she already half-guessed: how mercifully little Jace recalled of that unbearable night by Lake Lyn.

Jace was gazing at her with a confused expression, as if puzzled by what he saw in her face.

Then she heard his breath hiss through his teeth. He had gone very still, his fingers closing convulsively on the branch in his hands. There was a sharp crack, like a femur snapping, or a rotten ladder rung giving way. Jace looked as if he might throw up.

_Oh Jace,_ Clary thought, her heart twisting like a knife.

When he spoke, it was in a voice Clary barely recognized, flat and frighteningly distant.

"The only other time, that is."

He tossed the broken pieces of vine onto the table with a dull clang and swung round to face her, his eyes as blank as glass.

"Jace," she began, and then stopped, frightened by the look on his face. _I should never have asked him_, she thought in despair._ It's too soon. _In her mind's eye, Clary saw the brimming bowl tilting and slipping out of Jace's grasp, spilling and pouring across the floor like blood welling from an open wound.

It was all too much, thought Clary numbly. How many blows could anyone take — even Jace — and remain in one piece? How many times could you have the ground hacked out from under you and still remain standing?

Finding out the dead father you worshipped wasn't who you'd always thought he was — or in fact dead — but pretty much the most awful thing he could possibly be. Finding out he wasn't even your father at all. Whipsawing between believing yourself to be human, then tainted with the blood of demons, then blessed by an angel. Most unimaginable of all, knowing with unanswerable finality — beyond all possibility of appeal — that you were dead. And then finding yourself alive again.

Knowing it was your father who — regretfully — killed you.

Clary ached to touch him, to reach for his hand, wrap her arms tightly around him, but some instinct told her to stay where she was. So she jammed her hands in her pockets and sat unmoving, fingers clenched tightly around the jagged edge of her keys until she felt blood trickling down her palm. She could hear the harsh rise and fall of Jace's breathing beside her.

_He needs to know, _Clary thought. The rest could wait. Would have to wait, because only time could heal those scars, allow the ragged edges of Jace's torn life — his shattered sense of who he was and his place in the world — to begin to knit again.

But there was one thing that mattered more than anything. And no one else who could do it.

Pulling her hands out of her pockets, she took a breath and swung round to face him, fixing her eyes on Jace's still, white face.

"He loved you, Jace," she said very clearly. "_To the very end._"

Jace's eyes flicked up at that in a blaze of gold, something hard and metallic glinting in their depths. He laughed, a harsh, choking sound.

"Clary, he tried to kill me."

"He did kill you, Jace," she said softly. She found she couldn't quite bear to meet Jace's eyes.

"That's true. I suppose he did." His voice was pleasant, reflective, but there was something in its tone that raised the hairs on Clary's arms. "You might have trouble convincing a court of law—" he gestured towards himself with a deprecating shrug. "But let's not quibble about technicalities."

He swung himself off the table with sudden violence. Clary watched him, her heart in her mouth, as he sloshed away from her between the tables, his boots throwing up silver spray from his ankles like wings.

At the far end of the arbor he turned to look at her. "Of course," he added in the same sweetly dangerous voice, "he could probably have gotten acquitted on grounds of self-defence. Because if he hadn't beaten me to it, I would definitely have killed _him_."

He was leaning back against the guardrail that curved inwards from the river's edge, watching her through half-closed eyes. Now he swung himself up lightly onto the sooty ironwork so that he stood poised above the river looking down at her, one negligent hand on the arbor, like a surfer on the crest of a cast-iron wave.

"But then," he said evenly, "he wasn't actually my father — so it's not really patricide, is it?" His gaze, his smile, his movements all glittered like a drawn blade in the way she hated.

"Stop it, Jace," Clary said softly. He was stalking carelessly along the rain-slick railing, seemingly oblivious to the vertiginous drop beyond, and Clary had to remind herself that this was Jace and the chances of his losing his footing and slipping into the turbulent grey water thirty feet below were zero. The rain had slackened a little, but it was still falling heavily enough to drench him in seconds, soaking his jacket, and darkening his hair to the colour of dirty straw.

"You were going to kill him because you had to, Jace." Her heart was hammering inside her chest, but she tried to keep her voice steady. "He was going to slaughter the entire Clave, everyone except the children. Luke, my mom, Robert and Maryse — they'd all be dead if Valentine wasn't."

He said nothing, just continued prowling from one side of the arbor to the other. _Get him down,_ thought Clary urgently, taking a cautious step towards the railing and then another, like someone approaching a wary animal, alert for the faint quiver of muscle beneath the fur that warns you it's about to bolt. As she emerged into the open, the full force of the downpour struck her, and she blinked rain out of her eyes.

He watched her coming, his gaze as blank and inimical as the leaden sky stretching over them from horizon to horizon.

"Do you think I don't know that?" he said without inflection. "I would have killed him the way I'd kill a Drevak. Because that's what he was — a monster." His voice held no emotion: a bare statement of fact.

"And please don't try to tell me he had become a different person in the years since he sent me away, that the father who raised me wasn't the man who planned to wipe out the entire Clave — who killed the Silent Brothers — who ran his sword through my heart. My father was — always — Valentine. You were down in that cellar, Clary."

There was no answer to that. She'd been wrestling with the same impossible conundrum.

"It was all a lie, Clary." Jace's voice was fragile as a shard of glass. "Every bit of it. Only a fool would have believed anything else."

He looked down at his hands.

"Only a fool could have loved him." The words were so quiet Clary had to strain to hear. "The sort of fool my father despised." His lips curled in a tight, self-wounding smile.

Clary stopped walking, her heart cold. She was very close now, close enough to see the rapid rise and fall of Jace's breathing, the raindrops trickling down his white face and falling unregarded onto the bare skin of his collarbones like drops of blood. He had paused in his restless pacing, and she thought for a moment he might come down to her.

Then he turned away towards the river and Clary's heart stopped, thinking he was going to jump. But he only drew his hand out of his pocket, fingers curled tightly around something she couldn't see.

"Jace," she said urgently.

He didn't turn around. Clary watched his fist tighten slowly on whatever he was holding until his fingers were white with pressure, the tendons standing out at his wrist, and saw something crumble into the river in a pale shower of dust.

Her hair had been full of tawny dust like that when she got back to Amatis's house on the awful morning after Valentine's demons sacked the Glass City and Max was killed, every fold and seam of her cloak choked with it. And little bits of masonry too, which she'd had to dredge out of her pockets and from under her collar: broken fragments of the golden stonework that had been the Wayland Manor.

"Jace—" she began again, tilting her head back to look up at him, but he cut her off, a cold spark of anger in his eyes.

"If you're going to say that your childhood was a lie too, don't bother. Your mother took your memories from you, Clary, but the memories she took, the childhood, were ones you never knew you had."

Clary's heart had begun crashing like breakers against her chest, slow, deafening blows she could hear above the drumming of the rain.

"Maybe your life with her wasn't the whole truth, Clary, but it was — what it was. And your mother was who she was, whatever else she might have been or done in the past. But mine—"

Jace glanced down at his hand, streaked with the last gritty remnants of his childhood home, and wiped it impatiently on his jeans.

"The father I loved didn't exist, Clary. It was all a charade, a fantasy — from beginning to end." The breeze was blowing his wet hair into his eyes, but Jace didn't move to push it out of his face, just stood looking down at her from the railing, as remote and unreachable as one of the seagulls perched watchfully along the rail.

"So really, it hardly matters what I might have felt about him, does it?"

His voice was flat and cold as the wind off the river, and the empty, indifferent gaze he fixed on her, thought Clary despairingly, could have been his father's.

What happened next was as automatic as a shudder or a breath; it seemed to Clary afterwards that her body moved without any volition on her part at all. Grabbing the guardrail with both hands, she had one knee up before she realised what she was doing. The next instant, she had hauled herself up awkwardly onto the narrow, slippery railing and was scrambling upright to face Jace — as much of him as she could see, anyway, without craning her neck and jeopardizing her precarious balance.

"_Jace Wayland,_" she opened her mouth to say.

He didn't give her the chance. Faster than thought, a ferocious grip closed on her arm, as Jace's other hand caught her by the waist, dragging her roughly off the rail. Clary stumbled as she hit the ground, the soles of her feet smarting inside her soaking sneakers.

He yanked her upright, his hold on her arm tightening painfully. Shoving her dripping hair out of her eyes, she looked up at him, wincing as his fingers dug excruciatingly into her shoulder.

"By the Angel, Clary, what in _hell_ do you think you were doing?" Jace's face was white with fury. "Are you insane? You could have fallen three storeys into the river and been sucked under before you could open your mouth to squeal. Do you have the slightest idea how dangerous these currents are?" His eyes blazed with anger.

Of course I know about the currents in the East River, Clary wanted to say, I've lived in New York my whole life, Jace, longer than you have — but she took one look at Jace's murderous expression and held her tongue. At least that icy, indifferent look had faded from his eyes. They were glittering with rage, his whole body rigid with barely contained fury.

"Don't you ever _dare_ do something like that again, Clarissa Fray." He shook her, so hard that her teeth rattled and the raindrops flew off her waterlogged clothes like a wet dog. "Do you hear me, Clary?"

An answering spark of anger blossomed in Clary's chest. "And it's okay for you to prance suicidally along the stupid railing, because you don't care if you live or die?"

Of course that wasn't the point exactly, Jace could probably cross the East River without trouble on a piece of kite string, if he chose to. But thinking about the dead look she'd seen in Jace's eyes, Clary decided it was very much the point after all. Wrenching her shoulder out of his grasp, she glared at Jace.

He was looking down at her, his mouth a hard, angry line. He looked..._dangerous_. Clary wondered for a moment if he was going to hit her.

"Don't be stupid, Clary," he said in a low voice, and she shivered at the soft violence of his words. "You could have got yourself killed on that railing — and I couldn't. As you know very well." A tiny muscle jumped at the corner of his mouth.

Clary tried to make her voice reasonable. "Well you scared me too." Her hands were bleeding where they'd grabbed the flaking iron of the railing. Wiping her palm on the sopping hem of her coat, she took a resolute step towards him and laid it against his cold cheek.

His hand came up at that, fast, and in spite of herself she flinched — ridiculously, because of course it was only to catch her hand up in his own, his fingers warm and rough against her cold ones. In an instant she had controlled her first reflexive movement — but not quickly enough.

Jace went white and snatched his hand back, his expression appalled. "Did you think I was going to strike you?" Beneath his sodden jacket, his body was stiff with shock. "My God, is that what you thought, Clary?" He turned away, his face twisting.

"There isn't much to choose between us, is there?" he said in a low voice and Clary realized with a little thrill of horror that he meant Valentine. She stared at him for a moment, paralyzed, before recapturing his hand firmly with her own.

"Don't be silly," she chided him gently, and she was surprised by the calmness in her own voice. Beneath her hand, Jace's thin fingers were taut as piano wire. "Shhhh."

Laying a finger against his lips, Clary stood perfectly still, her eyes fixed on his white, rigid face. _I trust you,_ _Jace,_ they said as plainly as if she had spoken the words aloud. _With my body, with my life. _ _Even if you have no faith in yourself, I have faith in you. _

She couldn't remember the rain tailing off, but the raindrops falling like icy needles on her upturned face were barely a drizzle now. Beyond Jace's tangled head, the rain clouds were lifting, grey rags racing across the brightening sky. Clary could see drops of water trembling on the ends of his lashes like dew. In the pearly light, his eyes looked nearly opaque, as if, Clary thought with a sort of angry despair, he wasn't seeing her at all.

Standing on tiptoe, she reached up then and pulled his soaking head down to hers, brushing the hard line of his mouth softly with her own. She was half-expecting Jace to push her away, but he reached out for her then, his arms closing around her as if he were drowning, as if the surging grey waters of the East River were closing over his head.

"If anything were to happen to you, Clary—" There was no anger in his voice now, only a sort of blank helplessness. Clary could feel a faint vibration beneath her fingers, light as a cat's purr, and she realized with distant astonishment that Jace was shaking — rock-steady, unshakable Jace.

"Don't you understand?" Clary was startled by the queer note of desperation in Jace's voice. "You're all I have left, Clary. If I lost you—" Almost unwillingly, his eyes slid towards the angry grey water below them and he shuddered, the hard line of his body jarring against hers as she tried to wrap her arms more tightly around him.

"I don't think I would survive that," he said quietly. His eyes were still on the churning river, and with a sudden terrible clarity she remembered coming round in the back of Luke's pickup as it bobbed on the waves among the wreckage of Valentine's ship — and the look on Jace's face as he hurried to her side: like something inside him was splintering into tiny, irreparable pieces. Jace had watched her drown in the East River once already — or thought he had.

As if he'd heard her, Jace's grip tightened, crushing her soaking body against his so hard she had to put out a hand to one of the metal chairs to steady herself, the water streaming from her coat in rivulets. Jace's gaze was fixed on hers, as if he couldn't look away.

"You are my life now, Clary." With one finger, he slowly traced the line of her cheekbones, and the light in his eyes lit to a golden flare. "All that I have, all that I am."

His eyes travelled over her face as if he were memorizing it, as if it were something wondrous he'd never seen before and might never see again. "You are my other self, the keeper of my soul. Literally," he added softly, his eyes bright as stars. "You called me back, Clary.

"When I look in the mirror, the only part of me that makes sense any more is the miracle of belonging to you. The one island of solid ground beneath my feet, the one good thing in this universe that isn't swinging insanely about my head. The one feeling — against all probability —" for an instant, a wry smile twisted his features, "— that I can trust." A gleam of disbelieving laughter showed in his eyes for an instant, and Clary felt her own heart soar once again at the incredible reprieve they had been given.

Drawing down her hand, he carried it to his cheek, curving her fingers so his face lay in the palm of her hand. She could feel his pulse flutter against her skin, light and rapid as the beating of her own heart.

"All I have," he repeated, his eyes never leaving her face. "And all I need." It sounded almost like a vow.

"The rest is gone, swept away — water under the bridge, as Maryse would say." A hard note crept into his voice. "And I wouldn't want it back. Like the Piaf song Robert used to play on the old phonograph in his study. _Balayé pour toujours — je repars a zero._"

_Swept away for good; I'm starting over from scratch. _Clary's tenth-grade French wasn't great, but she could do this one at any rate — her mother liked to play it too, humming along softly under her breath as she stood in front of her easel. Clary wondered, a little bemused, if there had been a Edith Piaf craze among the Shadowhunters of her mother's generation. Or maybe it was simply the kind of song that tended to stick with anyone whose life had been touched by Valentine.

_Non, rien de rien; non, je ne regrette rien:  
Ni le bien qu'on m'a fait, ni le mal,  
Tout ça m'est bien egal.  
C'est payé, balayé, oublié:  
Je me fous du passé..._

_No, I don't miss any of it, none of it at all:  
The good parts, the terrible things that were done to me —  
It's all one to me now:  
Paid up, swept away, forgotten.  
I don't give a damn about the past..._

The song had a terrific swing to it, propelled by its surging brass and Edith Piaf's husky, unforgettable voice: the kind of hopeful music that made you want to do things, that proclaimed defiantly 'all will be well'. She had never stopped to think about the words before, or noticed the groundbass of loss beneath the brave declarations of triumph.

Jace was singing the final lines _sotto voce_, his lips against her hair. Clary twisted to look up at him and felt Jace's cheek curve ruefully beneath her hand — expecting some baffled comment, probably. He wasn't to know Piaf had been a staple of her own childhood too. His voice was tuneful and clear as sunlight in amber; she realized with a flicker of surprise she'd never heard Jace sing.

_Car ma vie, car mes joies,  
Aujourd'hui ça commence avec toi._

It was what her mother had always told her: _the past doesn't matter, darling, because my life began with you. _

But of course that hadn't been true. Clary drew a purposeful breath.

"It's all right," Jace said quickly, before she could speak. "I know what you want to tell me. That loving Valentine wasn't a mistake, because what kind of child doesn't love their father? That if I hadn't loved him, _that_ would have been the one really unforgivable thing he could have done to me, if he'd succeeded in making me into another Sebastian." Jace, she noticed, didn't seem able to stop thinking of him as 'Sebastian' either.

"But Clary, it doesn't matter either way, and shouldn't. I'm not that little boy any more, I haven't been for years. That part of my childhood ended a long time ago, and it would be stupid to want it back. Even if it had been everything I thought it was."

A line from somewhere floated into Clary's head. _When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things._

She gazed at the fair, self-contained boy standing before her, raindrops shining like jewels against the dark cloth of his jacket, and thought about childhood innocence, and Jace's extraordinary, appalling, irreparable boyhood.

Irreparable, and irreplaceable: as brilliant and transitory as the dew in the morning, thought Clary, picturing the golden light spilling across the green lawns of Jace's childhood home with a clarity that was as sharp as pain.

Jace was looking down at her, smiling a little, his luminous gaze on hers. There were flecks of grey in the gold, like a scattering of dry leaves on sunlit water. She wondered why she'd never noticed them before.

"None of it matters now, Clary; it's over, done with." He touched her face gently with the back of his hand. "What matters to me is you." There was a look in his eyes that made Clary's heart turn over: love and tranquil certainty, and underneath it an almost disbelieving relief, like someone wandering dark and dangerous roads who comes over the top of a rise to see the lighted windows of home shining in the darkness below him.

With his free hand, he brushed the damp hair back from her face, his gaze searching hers. She could see her own face reflected in his eyes, pale and anxious-looking. His fingers slid into the curls at the back of her head, and a shiver fled through her nerves, light as a moth's wing. She heard Jace's breath catch.

Then she was reaching up to wind her own arms around him, pulling him closer against her body, her hands tangled in his collar. She could feel the warmth of him even through the layers of wet cloth bunched between them. He gazed down at her, his gold eyes heavy-lidded, almost sleepy.

"Well that's all right, then," she said, trying for lightness. though her breathing was uneven now too. "Because what matters to me is you." With a not-quite-steady finger, she traced the curve of his cheekbone, the strong, delicate line of his mouth, and saw Jace's eyes darken.

"Clary—" he began and then stopped. She waited, eyes on his face. His lips parted and she thought he was going to finish, but he bent instead to brush his lips lightly against her cheek, sending fierce little pinwheels of longing spinning through her body. His lips traced the line of her jaw, drifted down the bare skin of her throat, along her exposed collarbones.

And then his mouth found hers: an unhurried, deliberate, lingering kiss that spread through her senses in a slow, dark flood. Clary closed her eyes dizzily, the blood singing in her veins. She could feel Jace's touch everywhere like points of white fire against her skin: sharp flickers that blazed up to flame, hot and bright as summer sun.

She opened her eyes and blinked, dazzled.

Beyond Jace's head, the sun had burst out from behind the lifting clouds, turning the water to glittering sheets of gold foil, and casting its golden, terrible brightness across the city. Sunshine painted the flat faces of the buildings along the river in blinding squares of light, and powdered Jace's fair hair with tiny sparks like the glint of mica in sun-warmed stone. His face was drowned in shadow. He kissed her again, his hands sliding slowly down her spine, and she trembled.

Jace freed his lips with a reluctance Clary could feel and drew back, a look of concern crossing his face. As she watched, the desire in his eyes faded, replaced by dawning self-reproach.

"You're freezing,' he said remorsefully. "We should get you back." Clary drew an unsteady breath to tell Jace no, it wasn't that at all — and realised he was right: she was chilled to the bone and shivering violently. Trickles of icy water were making their way down the back of her collar and seeping through her sleeves, and her spine was a hard, painful knot of cold.

Jace was already shrugging his jacket off, but of course it was as sopping wet as her own; Clary saw him realise it ruefully the same instant she did, sliding it back onto his shoulders.

"Let's get you out of the wind anyway." He kissed her again swiftly: a brief, sweet kiss that glimmered with the promise of _later,_ like the quick gleam of moonlight between racing clouds. Wrapping his fingers firmly around hers, he drew her away from the river, across the sparkling, rain-washed promenade and into the shelter of the small park that ran back towards East End Avenue.

|o|


	5. Permanent Marks

|o|

It _was_ warmer here away from the blustery river; even the trees seemed to feel it, their emerald leaves barely beginning to turn to gold. You could almost forget it was October, Clary thought, looking up at the sunlit boughs that arched above their winding path. To their left, the high slides and climbing structures of Carl Schurz playground were just visible above a tall, glossy bank of shrubbery; Clary could hear the cries of playing children, loud as a flock of jays in the sun-warmed air. As they passed the entrance, Jace slowed for an instant, before glancing quickly over at her and picking up his stride again.

She looked at him enquiringly.

"Another time. It will keep. But there's something there I want to show you sometime." His voice held a hint of excitement, anticipation, like he had a present for her — though Clary had a feeling it might be the sort of present boys liked to give you, the kind that generally involved a lot of assembly by the giver, like the Optimus Prime she'd got from Simon for her seventh birthday.

She was about to tell Jace she was up for the detour when a little gusty breeze shook out the leaves overhead, dousing them with a fresh shower of rain. The call of dry clothes suddenly seemed a lot more compelling. Clary wiped her hand across her face, suppressing a sneeze.

"I suppose you couldn't just tell me about it now?"

The grin he flashed her was as unrepentant as it was expected. "Not a chance. I want you to see this. But tomorrow will do, assuming the weather doesn't go berserk." Actually, Clary thought, the way the weather had been lately, that was a big assumption: berserk was a pretty good description of the string of storms which had been battering the city the past few weeks. But what did a bit of wind and rain matter, beside the small, bright spark of interest she could see kindling in Jace's shadowed face?

"Umbrellas," she said, tucking her hand into his as they drew aside to make way for a mother with a stroller and two children coming down the path towards them. "Big yellow mackintoshes and Paddington Bear hats. We can do berserk if we have to."

Jace looked affronted. "Shadowhunters don't wear yellow. Or Sou'westers."

"Wait, I have to give up wearing a raincoat? Shouldn't someone have warned me before I signed up for this?" She could feel Jace's light-heartedness spreading like tiny bubbles in her own blood.

"Rain _hats_," he corrected her, "I never said anything about raincoats." Taking her elbow, he steered her around a branch the storm had brought down across the path. "And trust me, nobody should wear a rainhat. Unless they're a bear. Or maybe a weather-beaten fisherman with far-seeing eyes — preferably somewhere a long way out to sea where no one but other far-seeing, weather-beaten fishermen can see them."

He wrinkled his nose. "Anyway, you can't possibly wear yellow. Isabelle could just conceivably get away with it — but she'd look stunning in a black plastic garbage bag, it's just how she's made." His gaze rested on her meditatively, a lurking warmth in his eyes which took the sting out of any implied comparison. Clary felt a blush creep into her cheeks, and saw the smile in Jace's eyes deepen.

"Apart from anything else, yellow clashes horribly with your hair." Dislodged from somewhere above their heads, a scattering of golden leaves was sailing down about them on the breeze; Jace caught one as it spun past and held it where she could see it against her soaking red braid. "See? Red and yellow — hideous."

They had reached the top of the broad curving stairs that led down towards the north edge of the park. Clary watched Jace as he turned and began to descend the worn stone steps, taking them two at a time — the contained grace of his stride, the fluid bend of wrist and arm carelessly skimming the wide granite balustrade. There was an ease about his movements, as if somewhere along the way a burden had lifted from his shoulders. His face looked cloudless, the harsh lines of despair smoothed away as though they'd never been. Too smooth, thought Clary with a sudden stab of misgiving.

_You haven't begun to mourn for him, Jace, _she thought, as she followed more slowly down the steps. _Or for yourself. _

You couldn't just decide it was all behind you, push the reset button, wipe the slate clean by sheer force of will: it didn't work that way. Jace couldn't rewrite his childhood out of existence any more than Valentine could.

Jace had talked as though it was a question of growing up — but this wasn't really about putting away childish things, was it? Of course growing up meant letting your childhood go. You had to move on and make room for new things into your life: new loves springing up — Clary glanced involuntarily at Jace, tranquilly waiting for her at the foot of the stairs — to overshadow the old childish ones.

You gave up the illusion of security too, the comforting, magical belief that grownups could make everything okay. She'd done her own share lately of relinquishing the illusory consolations of childhood.

But the past mattered. You could move on, but you couldn't just throw it away, however illusory — or awful — it had been. Because if you could throw the past away, didn't that make the present disposable too?

Loss and pain — scars that were etched into your being for all time — these were part of growing up too. Jace had been right about that, all those years ago. _Out of the mouths of babes,_ thought Clary, grief closing round her heart. You didn't just move on into adulthood and cast off the dead weight of your ruinous childhood. You carried it with you, like the other indelible Marks you bore. Or you would never be healed.

Jace had said to her bitterly, "the father I loved didn't exist." But in a way, that was the opposite of the truth. It was clear from everything Jace had ever told her that the fanatical, charismatic, mercilessly exacting father who brought him up had been Valentine in everything but name. Throughout his decade-long impersonation, he had never really pretended to be anything else. If he had, Clary thought with a sudden painful insight, if that terrible, golden childhood had been pure fabrication, if the father Jace knew had been less like Valentine — or Valentine had been less of a father to Jace — it would have been easier for him to set aside his gilded memories, and come to terms with the long black shadows cast back across that remembered light.

But if anything, Jace's upbringing had been uncompromisingly authentic — far more honest, in a way, than her own. The golden circle of love and security he remembered was real, and so was the horror and the cruelty. All of it, unthinkably, was true, and an inextricable part of who he was. The child with the dead falcon, the little boy squirming with laughter in a bath of spaghetti, the young man cradled bloody and dying in his father's arms; the dogged, valiant, shattered boy at her side who was only barely holding himself together by God knows what means — they were all...Jace.

Battered, bloodied Jace. And she had to break him.

"Jace," she said reluctantly and stopped walking, so that he stopped too and turned towards her, a question already forming in his golden eyes. For an instant, Clary's heart failed her. He had given her the knife; but looking into his face, she could hardly bring herself to use it, not with Jace looking at her like that, a smile curving the corners of his mouth and his heart in his eyes. As she watched, the light died in his face and was replaced by a watchful look, as if he'd heard some warning in her tone.

"I'm not all that matters, Jace." She could hear the regret in her own voice as she carefully loosed her opening volley. "Or all you need."

Jace gave her a look as if she was stating the obvious, and his voice answering her was patient. "You don't need to tell me that, Clary. I haven't forgotten about the Lightwoods. Or Max," he added, his face darkening. "Of course they matter to me, will matter till the day I die. I haven't forgotten either that I'm a Shadowhunter, and a part of the Clave, despite everything." He sounded almost relieved, as if he'd thought from her expression she was going to say something else, something worse, and had been bracing himself to meet it.

_You were right, Jace,_ thought Clary grimly. _I was. I am._

"Valentine matters, Jace," she said deliberately, eyes never leaving his face, and heard him suck in a breath as though she'd punched him.

She paid no attention. "Of course he does, Jace: he was everything to you for more than half your life. You can't wish that away — any more than I can wish away the fact that my mother married him." Beneath the clammy fabric of her cuffs, her fingers had begun to tremble; she stilled them with an effort.

"And you weren't a fool to love him, either." Clary paused and smiled a little crookedly. "Or if you were, then so was everyone I love best in the world. Which has to mean something."

_For me too,_ she thought reluctantly. Jace, her mother, Luke: all of them had loved him once, the man whose dark heredity she carried, however little, thankfully, she could see it in the mirror. The man whose daughter she was, like it or not.

"You all loved him — well, all except Simon, I guess." She said it aloud, because Jace was staring at her; though whether it was incomprehension or something else in his white face, she couldn't tell. "And the other way round too," she added with a faint feeling of surprise. "You might be the three people in the world that Valentine ever loved."

And had gone on loving, thought Clary, an unexpected constriction in her chest — to the day that he died. Well, maybe not Luke. But Valentine had clearly never gotten over the loss of her mother — any more, thought Clary with a fresh ache of understanding, than he'd gotten over losing his young son. Even if that loss had been deliberately, cold-bloodedly self-inflicted.

Jace was standing very still, his hands curled tightly at his sides. She was close enough to distinguish the fine black shadows his lashes cast against his cheek, fragile as thistledown in the cold, bright sunshine. You could see the marks of what had been done to him printed starkly in his face: a hurt so deep, Clary thought, that there wasn't any part of Jace it didn't reach.

"I know I said to you before that Valentine wasn't your real father because he didn't act like a father to you, because he didn't take care of you." She'd believed it when she said it — and it was probably what Jace had needed to hear at the time, to slow the dizzying sense that he no longer had the faintest idea who he was, or where he belonged. To help him start picking up the pieces of his life and go on as the person he'd been for seven years now: Alec and Isabelle and Max's brother, Maryse and Robert's adopted son.

"But I was wrong, Jace," she said doggedly. Closing her fingers on the front of Jace's jacket, she gazed up into his closed face, wishing for the millionth time it wasn't such a long way up to look him in the eye. "Wrong about both."

She paused, glancing around. The picturesque dell where they had come to a halt was deep and nearly circular, ornamentally ringed by soft green shrubbery. Wooded slopes rose steeply above them on three sides, fenced off by a low curving balustrade. Across the fourth, a massive stone arch loomed over the path leading out of the park, its dark sides curtained in ivy. Reaching back, Clary braced her hands on the stone balustrade and hoisted herself into sitting position so she was looking straight into Jace's too-dark eyes, their gold all swallowed up in pools of black.

"Valentine sent you away, Jace." Her voice sounded thin in her own ears, but she made herself keep going. "He sent you to safety, even though — I think — he loved and missed you. He didn't use you the way he'd used my mom, the way he used everyone else he ever knew. You were the one person he chose not to use."

Jace just looked at her, his pale hair tumbling into his eyes. "Of course he wanted to use me, Clary." He sounded deathly tired. "He tried every lure he could think of to get me to join him against the Clave. You heard the lies he told me in Renwick's. And when I was stupid enough to go see him on his ship, he offered me — well, everything, to fight on his side." He stopped abruptly.

"Yes, but he let you choose didn't he?" Her pulse beat sharply in her throat. "He hoped you'd come back to him, but he let you go. Like he let you go when you were a little boy." Clary swallowed, and when she spoke there was an aching note of sadness in her voice.

"Valentine did look after you as a child, Jace, in the only way he could — knowing what he really was, and what he intended to do someday. Knowing _you_: what it would do to you, to try and make you into the ruthless killing-machine he'd wanted you to be.

"Or needed you to be, anyway," she said, staring out into the trees. "I'm not sure he even wanted it, not really. He pretty much said so, didn't he, when—"

She broke off, and felt rather than saw Jace flinch. She could hear the echo of Valentine's voice ringing in her ears, dark as old bronze. _ You were too gentle. You felt others' pain as if it were your own. Understand this my son — I loved you for those things. But the very things I loved you for made you no use to me._

Valentine had thought to raise his son the way he raised his hunting birds — Shadowhunters of the sky, he called them. What was it he'd said to Jace? _Falcons are fierce and wild, savage and cruel; they are not meant to be loving pets._

But Jace was none of these things.

Clary thought of the savage reproof Valentine had flung at his son. _I told you to make this bird obedient; instead you taught it to love you. _And taking the falcon Jace had reared with such loving care, he had snapped its neck, so that his son would never forget the terrible power of love. When did he first realise, Clary wondered, what he himself had done?

Did he already recognize, even then, the first turning in the road leading inexorably to the shores of Lake Lyn?

Jace was so close that she could have reached out and taken his averted face between her hands. She sat on them instead, letting the weight of her body press her palms into the cool, dank stone. She could feel the cold seeping into her jeans.

"Faking his own murder was a terrible thing to do to you — only Valentine could have done it, probably." For a moment, her voice wavered.

"But I think he did it for you, Jace. He knew staying with him could only harm you, so he sent you away. He gave you up to protect you. Which is about as parental as it gets."

Jace's head came up at that, his face going paler and paler, and she saw a spasm cross his features, his mouth twisting as though he were being slowly torn apart from the inside. For an instant, Clary felt like Valentine standing over Jace, the red-hot stele gripped in his hand.

She turned her head away, unable to bear the look on Jace's face. There was a bronze statue in the centre of the cobbles, a young boy dressed in a tunic, with tumbling hair and a bow and arrow at his side. He was seated on a log, his hands clasped carelessly around one knee, and there were animals gathered about his feet: a hare, a fox cub, a fawn — Clary couldn't tell if they were his companions or his quarry. Looking at him suddenly made her feel unbearably sad.

"You told me once," she said, eyes still on the bronze boy, "that you were happy then, Jace, because it was the only time you were sure who you were. Those years in Idris with your father, I mean. The one time you felt like you knew where you belonged."

Valentine had talked to her about belonging too, quoting the Song of Songs at her. He'd got it all wrong: love had nothing to do with ownership. But maybe she'd missed the point too. Belonging to someone wasn't simply about giving yourself to them completely: _you could do anything with me, and I would let you. _It had just as much to do with the way they'd given themselves — even grotesquely inadequately, defectively — to you.

Jace had said it himself. Clary could hear his thoughtful voice in her head, and every word was like a shard of glass in her heart.

_Someone who had a stake in my life. Someone to grieve when I died..._

She closed her eyes for an instant, pierced by a grief so sharp it was almost a physical pain.

She opened them again. "I think what you were really saying, Jace," she said gently, "is that you were loved."

All the remaining colour drained from Jace's face.

"Clary, why are you doing this?" Jace's voice cracked. He looked as if the planes of his face were being driven apart under intolerable pressure, the kind that crumples continents and forces mountains inch by inch into the sky. Clary thought of that small hand twisting and breaking up under the strain of a force too strong for it to weather. But Valentine had gauged his son's strength rightly in the end.

_Because I love you_, she thought, blinking back angry tears.

"Because it doesn't work, Jace. You can't start again from zero." Clary could hear the raw pain in her own voice. "You can't erase the past, not without erasing yourself with it: nobody can. My mom thought she could; she tried to run away and make a brand-new life for herself with me in New York. But it didn't work for her, any more than it did for me. Not that it was a mistake for her to live as a mundane. But all those years she could have been with Luke, if she hadn't been so desperate to cut herself off from what she'd been." Clary bit her lip. "All those wasted years.

"You and I both found out this summer what happens when you try not letting yourself feel what you _want_ to feel." She gave him a small smile. It still gave her a sick feeling, thinking about those awful weeks she'd spent believing Jace was her brother and that there was something poisoned and wrong about the way she felt about him, when it was twined so deep into her being she couldn't imagine rooting it out and having anything of herself left behind.

"But the opposite is true too, Jace. All the things you don't want to feel — you have to let yourself feel them too."

Or in the end, thought Clary, the result was the same. Work hard enough at lying to yourself, and in the end you began to believe your own lies. And that had been the most terrifying thing of all about Valentine, hadn't it?

She reached out for him then, taking him gently by the shoulder and turning him towards her, so that the brilliant sunlight fell unforgivingly on his face.

"Your childhood wasn't a lie, Jace," she said steadily. "Any more than mine was. Not in the things that matter." There was no uncertainty in her voice now. "Your father loved you to the moment he died, Jace — and you loved him, and it was his tragedy and yours that he thought he'd been charged by Heaven with saving the world. An earlier century might have called him a visionary; maybe we'd call him insane. And maybe everything he did would have been wrong even if it really had been the only way save the entire world from destruction, I don't know.

"But I do know this, Jace: Abraham loved Isaac. And nothing but your father's sacred duty to God, as he saw it, could ever have driven him to do what he did. _ I was there,_" she said quietly.

Jace was staring at her, almost as if her were seeing her for the first time. She could see the sweat shimmering on his collarbones as they rose and fell raggedly with his breathing. His face was washed with golden light, the pen strokes of grief and pain sharp as a Rembrandt etching against his fine, bloodless skin.

"You loved him," she repeated, because Jace was still staring at her blindly, a look on his face like he was coming to pieces. "And he loved you, and he's gone."

And at last he broke down — for the first time, Clary guessed, since he was a very small boy. Leaning forward, she pulled him into her arms, the rough stonework scraping the backs of her knees as she gathered him close and held him, her cheek pressed against his tangled head and her own tears rolling slowly into his hair.

_And I killed him,_ she thought with a little jolt, hard and precise as an electric shock to her chest. Of course she hadn't killed Valentine, exactly — that was the Angel, or the will of Heaven or whatever — she'd only cleared the way for the fatal bolt. And Valentine had _murdered_ Jace...

But for the first time, picturing the dark figure crumpling silently onto the sand, Clary felt a sharp pang of sorrow and regret — not that she'd brought him down, because what choice did she have? — but that she'd had to. It had been much more comfortable simply hating Valentine, because he was hateful and evil and insane and had tried to destroy everyone she loved, one after another. Thinking of things as black and white — the way Valentine did. But nothing in the world was like that really, except possibly demons. And they weren't of this world, were they? That was the thing about humans: they were all mixed up, the good and the bad all tangled terribly together. Wasn't it Valentine himself who once said something like that to her?

A lump rose in Clary's throat, cutting off the words she was going to say. She held onto Jace, a little desperately, feeling the strength of him beneath her fingers, the taut curve of his back warm and solid and familiar as her own body. Between her hands, Jace's body was steadying, the racking convulsions of grief slowly dwindling away.

"Oh damn it all," he said indistinctly. "Damn, damn, damn." Clary gazed down at him through a wavering lens of tears.

"What is it, Jace?" she said very softly.

"Waylands don't cry. My father always said." His voice was muffled against her shoulder.

She pulled him closer, his fine, damp hair curling like raw silk around her fingers. "But Morgensterns do, Jace. I mean, look at me." She gave him a watery smile. "And you're a thousand times more Morgenstern than I'll ever be — no matter what blood runs in your veins.

"I wouldn't want you any other way, either." she added gently, taking his face in her hands and tilting it so she was looking right into the small, steady glow, bright as a candle flame, that shone in the depths of his golden eyes. "And neither should you — Jace Herondale Wayland Morgenstern Lightwood."

She gazed at him, a serious expression on her face. "They're all a part of who you are, Jace — like the rings of a tree." Her eyes slid past him to the woodland climbing up the hillside, glowing like stained glass in the afternoon light.

"Or lines carved into its bark, maybe. The living tree grows around them over time, but they're never wholly lost." Her voice was still shaky, but she could feel a growing flame of conviction spreading inside her chest.

"And your father gave every one of them to you, Jace — from the potions he administered to Céline to his decision to send you away to the Lightwoods. If it weren't for him, you wouldn't be the amazing person you are." She felt for his hand, winding his fingers determinedly into her own with love and a sort of wondering gratitude. Behind them, she could hear a soft rustling in the undergrowth, as though some small creature was foraging quietly for its autumn stores.

"He had all these insane schemes for saving humankind and changing the world, and in the end they came to nothing. But that one thing he did might have made more difference to the world than anything else he could ever have achieved.

"It transformed the world for me, anyway," she added softly. "Whatever terrible things Valentine did, I guess that has to count for something."

He looked up at her then, his eyes very bright. "Maybe," he said. "But the greatest gift he gave this world, Clarissa Fray Morgenstern, was the one he didn't even know about, not until long afterwards. The one that changed my world — permanently."

Eyes shining, he bent down and kissed her softly, so that Clary felt her heart expand inside her chest with the radiance of a thousand suns, a radiance so bright it seemed to illuminate the darkness behind her closed eyes. When she opened them, Jace's face was ablaze with the same brilliant light, a look on his face that took her breath away. Clary thought of the exultation of Piaf's trumpets, the angel flaring to incandescent glory beneath the stones of the Wayland manor, and for a second she almost expected to see the ghostly shadow of wings hovering beyond Jace's head, the way she saw him in her dreams.

He looked down at her, his lips curving in the sweet, irrepressible smile she loved best, and kissed her again. Then sliding his hands to her waist, he swung her lightly down onto the cobbles and taking her by the hand, walked out with her beneath the shadowed arch to the waiting city beyond.

_Cantab / NYC  
May - Sept 2012_

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_A Note about Location:_  
_Pedants will observe that I've played fast and loose with local geography: you can't actually quite see Renwick's from the '80s and the Parks Dept has yet to install either arbor or sleek new picnic tables on that stretch of the river, though they've done it elsewhere. Nor is the entrance to Carl Schurz playground quite where I've put it. But the broad outlines of river, park and promenade are correct, and the statue is really there. And after all, Clare put the Institute half a block out into the East River..._

* * *

**If you liked this story, I hope you'll find a moment to let me know. That way I'll know what to write more of. You might also enjoy my Jace and Valentine one-shots, Fall, 1997 and An Orchard So Young in the Bark. —MM**


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